Jill Whalen, one of the pioneers of SEO, puts out a weekly newsletter that is always packed full of great information and juicy tidbits. This week she provides a list of her "must-have" extensions for Firefox browser. Being a new Firefox user myself, I found this portion of the newsletter especially interesting and asked her if I could re-publish those here. So with no further ado, here they are.

Jill's Firefox Must-have Extensions:

Adblock: Basically blocks ads so you don't see them. You know all those stupid crazy spinny flashy ads? I never see 'em! It just leaves a nice blank spot, or you can even set it to fill up the space. When viewing a site for a client, though, you might need to turn this one off, as you would miss something that is blocked.

IE Tab: One of my favorites. Some pages just can't be viewed right in FF (like WPG reports or online banking sites). When that happens, you can just click a button and it opens Internet Explorer (IE) in a tab on FF as opposed to your having to open IE separately. Doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but for some reason, it really is!

PDF Download: This one rocks, too, if you happen to click a link on a page that is a PDF and you don't want to wait for Adobe Acrobat to open. It will let you just view it as HTML instead, plus a few other options. Love it!

SearchStatus: A must for SEOs. Displays Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, plus a bunch of other things. One thing I like is that there's a setting where it highlights any links on a page that are using a rel="nofollow" attribute.

BBCode: Probably one of my most-used extensions, but not one you'll need unless you post at forums a lot. This one automates a lot of forum codes that you might use in your posts. The best thing is that it allows you to add custom BBCodes as well. Scottie has installed a lot of those in our High Rankings Forum, so I am able to also put them in my BBCode extension to have easy access to them.

Copy Plain Text: If you ever copy and paste something from a webpage into Word or whatever, and find it getting formatted into the same font that it was on the page, this one is for you. It allows you to just copy it as plain text like it says. I use this more than I'd ever imagine!

Auto Copy: Another one helpful if you're pasting stuff from web pages a lot. I use this one a zillion times a day. It allows you to simply highlight any words on a page, and it puts them into your clipboard for pasting into another application or wherever. Who knew that hitting "copy" or Ctl-C was so much work! :-) In fact, I find myself highlighting text in Word or in an email and forgetting that it isn't automatically copied. I wish there were extensions for every application I use!

Minimize to Tray: Most people probably wouldn't care about this one, but I actually have a perfect reason for needing it. I listen to my local radio station's streaming radio music feed via my browser, but I don't like to leave the window open as I find I keep coming back to it by mistake when I'm looking for another window/tab I was using. This extension allows me to open up a new window just for my music feed, and then minimize it to the system tray instead of to the windows taskbar. This gets it out of my way and I don't click it by mistake. Now my music runs in the background and it doesn't even seem like it's coming from the browser. I'm sure there are other good uses for this one that I just haven't thought of yet. Pretty much anything that you need a browser window open for, but don't need to see.

FireFTP: If you ever need FTP access to a website on a limited basis, this works fairly well. It seems to upload a bit slowly, but it's good for quick stuff.

Gcache: Allows you to right-click on a page and see Google's cache of the page. Great for knowing if Google has a page indexed or not. Helps to spot penalties and other things.

Always Remember Password: Allows FF to keep a list of your passwords so that when you get to a site that you have to log into, it fills it in for you. (Doesn't seem to work for all sites.)

And last but not least...

Advanced Dork: Allows you to do all those cool advanced Google commands like intitle, inurl, etc. I haven't really experimented with this one much yet, but I have a feeling that once I use it a bit, I won't be able to live without it.

Great list, Jill! Some of these extensions I have already tried while others I'm off to test. If you would like to hear more from Jill on a weekly basis, I would encourage you to sign up for her Advisor Newsletter. It is truly one of the best newsletters that are currently available and always gets me to stop what I am doing to give it a read.